Code Standards in the AI Era: What to Keep, What to Toss

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:00:00 +0800

Last year I was still religiously following the “functions under 20 lines” rule. This year I had AI write a 300-line data processing function. It worked fine. I stared at the screen for a while thinking—who was this rule even for?

For humans.

Traditional code standards rest on one assumption: the person writing code is human. Humans make mistakes. Humans have limited working memory. Humans will name variables tmp2_final_v3 at 3 AM. So we invented a whole system of rules to constrain ourselves.

Code Standards on The Peon Post

Code Standards in the AI Era: What to Keep, What to Toss